Welcome to Talking Feds, a round table that brings together prominent former federal officials and special guests for a dynamic

discussion of the most important political and legal topics of the day.

I'm Harry Littman. No sooner have the Manhattan Jury 4 person pronounced guilty 34 times than

Trump and his surrogates initiated a coordinated public campaign to trash the verdict and the case and lay it all at the

feet of President Biden. None of the critics disputed the facts that the

Manhattan DA had proven nor the import of those facts as potentially

having interfered with the 2016 election.

In fact, few, if any of the critics even had seen or heard the trial proceedings.

But that didn't stop them from pillorying the judge, doxing the jury, calling for criminal

prosecutions of the members of the January 6th committee and issuing a literal call to arms.

The attack on President Biden was particularly ironic since not only was the case brought by a state district attorney, but Biden's son

Hunter last week went on federal trial for gun charges that themselves were inconsistent with longstanding DOJ policy

in analogous cases. The charges had the whiff of political influence as

the Special Counsel handling the case a Trump

administration holdover had brought them only after Republicans on the

hill had lambasted him for going easy on the younger Biden in a plea bargain that had unraveled in

court. Elsewhere, Biden moved to get something of an upper hand on Republicans in the perennially vexing area of immigration

with an executive order that accomplished modest parts of the bipartisan deal

that previously had been derailed by Trump, who prefers to campaign

on the claim that the system is broken than to try to fix it.

To analyze these pitched battles on their own terms, but also through the prism of

raw power politics and the coming election that has taken over our discourse, we welcome three of the country's most well-known political

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